Fast Boat To China: High-Tech Outsourcing and the Consequences of Free Trade – Lessons From Shanghai by Andrew Ross (New York: Vintage Books, 2006)
Most observers today are aware that jobs are being outsourced to China, India and other nations at an alarming rate. From factory jobs to white-collar, high-tech positions, the exporting of labor is one of the most controversial issues in America.
Yet few people know much about the other end – about the people who are actually working these jobs and how their own lives have been thrown into tumult by these new economic forces. Andrew Ross spent a year in China, interviewing local employees and their managers in Taiwan, Shanghai and the far western provinces of the world’s most populous country. In a quite engaging and informative book, he shows how the Chinese workforce has inherited many of the same worries as American workers, such as job instability, long hours and awareness of their own expendability. He reports on the daily reality of corporate free trade and explores the growing competition between China and India. This is an eye-opening exploration of an unseen side of our globalized world.
This was probably the best book on globalization I’ve read in 2 years precisely because it placed China, not India, at the center of the revolution of offshoring of blue-collar and white-collar jobs. The fact that the author is a native Scotsman and NYU professor who has written more than 10 books on labor around the world and can hardly be considered “pro-management” cannot be overlooked, but any way you slice this, it is the kind of story missed by the Lou Dobbs lynch mob and the high priests of globalization who see free trade as an elixir to all the world’s problems.
The story in Fast Boat to China centers around Shanghai, the historic financial capital of China that has exploded since Deng Xioping liberalized China’s economy in 1979 to become one of the world’s great (but poorly understood) cities once again. Over seven chapters and a compelling introduction and epilogue which reach 265 pages, Ross drives a narrative that weaves sociology, anthropology, economics, political and historical vantage points to help readers like this one who have never visited China firsthand understand the “China factor” beyond the mainstream media soundbites.
- The Shanghai Squeeze detailed how outsourcing became a way of life over the past 15 years. Ross describes the pros and cons of what has happened to Shanghai in what he termed the “balance sheet of outsourcing.” By comparing and contrasting two city views (new, post-1979 capitalist Pudong vs. the historical old city riverfront area called the Bund), he is able to show how the new Shanghai has embraced te concept of “localize or die” and evolved from “from milk cow to gold coast.”
- Raising The Bar explains how China (led by Shanghai) navigated the geopolitical currents of the last 25 years to gain advantage from achieving Permanent Most Favored Nation status from the US Congress in 2000 (after a decade of trying after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacres) and entrance to the World Trade Organization earlier this decade. Ross called this “steering the gravy train” and introduces concepts such as “the rainbow’s mouth,” “the art of the doorknock,” “the ladders of mobility,” and “a little pain, a lot of gain” along the way.
- The Sent-Up Generation chapter (playing off the Sent-Down Generation that came of age during the disasterous Cultural Revolution of the 1960s) was centered around a series of personal interviews with rank and file workers in the Shanghai Pudong Software Park (SPSP), and how the hyper growth and unrealistic expectations of many 20-something Chinese workers has led to communication difficulties with higher-ups and inconsistencies in creating the “great Chinese engineer.” Possibly the most illuminating point of the chapter was the description of the emergence of what the Chinese Ministry of Education labeled “grey collar jobs” – which included a wide range of professions including fashion designers, software engineers, ad writers and numerical control technicians, among others. Demographically speaking, the “white collar misses” or xiaojie – legions of English-speaking, fashion forward, cosmopolitan lifestyle and socially independent “Shanghai Girls” coming of age was another fascinating revelation from Ross.
- Mister Tata Comes To Town explained how Indian IT heavyweights like TCS, Wipro and Infosys moved into Shanghai in the years following Y2K to exploit what one Indian politician called “India will be the world’s office while China is the world’s factory. This is the most familiar part of the book, as it chronicles the tensions between the two cultures as they vie for IT supremacy in the 21st century value chain. Personal interviews with managers and new joiners from both perspectives (Indian management vs. Chinese workers) were fascinating and worth reading for anyone who has had to deal with cultural oversimplifications and perceptions of dominant behavior by one group to another.
- The Suzhou Price chronicles the meteoric rise of the Delta economic circle that rings around Shanghai (led by Suzhou) in the last 5 years as multinational firms have started to look for more cost savings that the metropolis could deliver on its own. This “nearshore” alternative to Shanghai was virtually unknown to this reader before this chapter, and includes joint ventures with Singapore in the Suzhou Industrial Park that were utterly fascinating as Ross told them from multiple ground-level perspectives. The author does a good job talking about the quiet desperation that new migrants to the Delta economic circle feel as they start “working on the value chain gang.”
- Go West takes “nearshore” for Shanghai to the logical extreme and brings readers to China’s last frontier: neglected western provinces like Gansu, Guizhou, Qinghai, Shannxi, Sichuan, Yunnan and the special autonomous regions of Ningxia, Tibet, Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang. It involved colossal expenditures on infrastructure (highways, railways, airports, gas pipelines, water diversions, electricity transmission projects and communication networks. Ross takes the reader inside China’s Communist party politics and the Go West strategy appeal to nationalism and self-sufficiency, and the “man on the street” interviews from the “last mile” of political economy and development illuminated the many differences between China and India’s approaches to joining the first world club.
- Cross-Strait Flights is the final chapter, and looks at Shanghai’s 60 year history (and close integration since direct flights were added this decade) to Taiwan. Some of the most shocking interviews in the book came with fiercely independent engineers in Taipei who were much more sanguine about their long-term prospects vs. that of mainland China. The commentary on the US experience with offshore outsourcing from a Taipei and Shanghai perspective gave this an almost-Karl Marxian dialetic feel, and would make for great re-reading 10 years from now after some of the prophecies and predictions on the future of global distributed delivery are behind us.
Fast Boat To China takes on pro-China corporate boosterism that is rampant in the mainstream media, and uses participant/observer techniques to tell multiple stories with different voices inside the same narrative to a stirring effect. This is a must read for all those who want to peel back the onion and come away with the same “ah-ha” feeling about China that Tom Friedman created for India with The World Is Flat 3 years ago right now.
